aewm: Nice, easy, clean, lightweight, hackable. One of the few floating wms I really likeevilwm: An aewm derivative. Much the same, but a little less friendly and heavier on keyboard controlswm2: Ultralight floating wm. Doesn't do anything apart from manage windows, so you'll be wanting to work with other apps as wellIon: I liked this a fair bit. It's a very nice tiling manager, and the tabs are excellentlarswm: Another tiling window manager, but quite different from Ion. Does floating and sticky as well, can mix themdwm: Tiling, and much like larswm in how it manages things. Does tiling or floating at any one time, not both. Also very lightweight.Enlightenment 17: Very nice, my favourite of the full desktop environments. Can be unstable.

There are of course dozens which I've forgotten, but those are some which I would recommend right now. I'm currently using evilwm, btw.

Edit: Hell, I'll just post opinions on all the ones I can remember offhand. God knows I've tried enough.

blackbox: Reasonable. I tend to prefer fluxbox, but it's quite neat. fluxbox: The heaviest manager I have installed right now. I only prefer it to blackbox because it does tabbingpwm: Ion without tiling. Sucks, IMOGnome: Well, I prefer it to KDE. But that's mostly because I prefer GTK to QT. Far too bloated for my taste thoughKDE: Don't like this either. At least as heavy as Gnome, still not as easy or sensible to use as some of the lighter ones.XFCE: About the heaviest I can tolerate. This is pretty neat, but I'm not a great fan.flwm: I can barely remember this. I seem to recall it being fairly good, but not world breakingratpoison: Not keen, but there are people who swear by this. I don't like the over heavy keyboard emphasiswmii: Not so keen on this, but I swore by it for a while. Tiling, and could be worse9wm: No thanks, unless you really have some perverse desire to make things behave like Plan 9twm: Basically default, I really don't like this.AfterStep: I didn't like this - couldn't really get how it worked, for a startWindowMaker: See aboveWindowLab: This is quite neat, and very different. Couldn't manage menu configs.

General comments: I like things to be very lightweight. I like both floating and tiling, for different reasons. Tabbed is good. Things have to be 'sensible' - it can draw a window for the first time without asking me for the shape and size. Keyboard controls are vital, but never make it so that you can't interact without the mouse. There are different mouse buttons - use them.

Second Edit: Hey, I remembered some more! You have to wonder how many there even are.

Matchbox: Interesting. It's nice for small screens, but does feel wasteful on a big one. I like it though.JWM: I didn't like it. Unsurprising, as I didn't like IceWM eitherIceWM: I didn't like the style - too Windowseyfvwm: Classic, but I didn't like the way this worked either.

I've heard good things about both Ion3 and Xmonad, but have never used either.

I voted Xfce, but I've wanted to try Ion for a while now, just because tiling seems like a really good idea, it seems "cleaner" in a way, and I've liked it on the few occasions that I've used one. My formative years were in a CLI so I think I might be more comfortable with tiling and several workspaces; I almost never use multiple workspaces meaningfully with a floating window manager. Also, I often find myself trying to emulate tiling manually, which is pretty ridiculous

Right now, I'm using AfterStep. It was kind of painful at first, coming from fluxbox, which I also keep installed. However, I like AfterStep. I was always interested in the NeXTSTEP UI, it looked really cool. It took a while for me to get used to it, but I like it now. I also intend to try out fvwm in the future. The least favorite that I have used was GNOME. Too clunky, and too much like windows. AfterStep and Arch go together very well, in my experience.

I use GNOME, but never really got to like KDE. I can't get over the naming scheme for 80% of the programs... Is that K required?

Although, I guess I am kinda biased only because I never tried KDE with Ubuntu, only KDE with Sabayon Linux. Ubuntu just works better for me, because it actually gets all my hardware. I can't say the same about Sabayon, which is pretty, but too bloated for my tastes.

Summary, GNOME.

OLEANA, PUT SOME JELJEL ON MY WUUD TO MAKE IT YOOJ SO I CAN GO BAVOOM!

You think KDEs naming scheme is bad, you should see Enlightenment's. Everything starts with an e. EVERYTHING.

Anyway, after some beating my head against the wall and some well-placed posts to the Ubuntu fora, I'm now running E17 instead of Gnome! Hurrah! While it's still obviously incomplete, it's quite stable (so far) and very, very pretty. I'm not seeing myself switching back to Gnome anytime soon...

My only complaint is that there's no volume control and my keyboard volume buttons (which worked peachy under GNOME) don't work anymore. I'm sure there's some way to get that kind of stuff working, I just don't have time to futz with it right now.

Meaux_Pas: Is it fucking Taint Sunday or something?liza: Screw y'all, I'm going to the moon

Will wrote:You think KDEs naming scheme is bad, you should see Enlightenment's. Everything starts with an e. EVERYTHING.

Anyway, after some beating my head against the wall and some well-placed posts to the Ubuntu fora, I'm now running E17 instead of Gnome! Hurrah! While it's still obviously incomplete, it's quite stable (so far) and very, very pretty. I'm not seeing myself switching back to Gnome anytime soon...

My only complaint is that there's no volume control and my keyboard volume buttons (which worked peachy under GNOME) don't work anymore. I'm sure there's some way to get that kind of stuff working, I just don't have time to futz with it right now.

Dig in the configs a bit, there should be a volume control module. Try looking under the add to panel dialog.

Beryl/Compiz: Like kde but more so. It provides the ability to do things like zoom in and out, invert colors, watch multiple desktops at once, and most importantly, throw jello windows around on the surface of a cube. Not advisable when running on batteries.

Will wrote:You think KDEs naming scheme is bad, you should see Enlightenment's. Everything starts with an e. EVERYTHING.

Anyway, after some beating my head against the wall and some well-placed posts to the Ubuntu fora, I'm now running E17 instead of Gnome! Hurrah! While it's still obviously incomplete, it's quite stable (so far) and very, very pretty. I'm not seeing myself switching back to Gnome anytime soon...

My only complaint is that there's no volume control and my keyboard volume buttons (which worked peachy under GNOME) don't work anymore. I'm sure there's some way to get that kind of stuff working, I just don't have time to futz with it right now.

Dig in the configs a bit, there should be a volume control module. Try looking under the add to panel dialog.

Heh, it's funny that Gnome has almost half of the votes yet only one person has said anything positive about it in this thread.

Motto: Gnome users don't need to boast.

As for sticking up for it, it's well featured, configurable, and sure it's bloated, but on todays (or at least my) hardware it's hardly slow. I know that isn't a good precedent to set for software in general, but it certainly doesn't hold as a strong argument against it in my book.

crazyjimbo wrote:Heh, it's funny that Gnome has almost half of the votes yet only one person has said anything positive about it in this thread.

Motto: Gnome users don't need to boast.

As for sticking up for it, it's well featured, configurable, and sure it's bloated, but on todays (or at least my) hardware it's hardly slow. I know that isn't a good precedent to set for software in general, but it certainly doesn't hold as a strong argument against it in my book.

I'd bet that most people use Gnome because it's the Ubuntu default.

And there's also a lot of us here who like to keep bloat down - I'm on quite an old box, so Gnome is laggy enough that I want something much lighter.

Will

Crashes E every time? Hm. BTW, can you currently not display desktop icons? I seem to recall there was a while where they were compulsory.

"Wile E. Coyote was a theoretical mathematician." - Leliel"Modern life can be so boring without elements of the bizarre or the fantastical. Hence, we have steampunk." - Me

xyzzy wrote:Crashes E every time? Hm. BTW, can you currently not display desktop icons? I seem to recall there was a while where they were compulsory.

I think when I first added it, it worked decent enough, but later it would constantly crash E, so I took it off. If I had time to kill, I might try writing a patch for it myself, but I don't these days.

I'm not displaying desktop icons, no. I don't particlarly like having anything on my desktop, so I'm happy with it like that.

Meaux_Pas: Is it fucking Taint Sunday or something?liza: Screw y'all, I'm going to the moon

I've used KDE, Fluxbox and Gnome, and I really prefer Flux. KDE takes ages to load on the uni systems (network boot) and is waaay to bloated. gnome is a bit better, but I really like the amount of configurability of Fluxbox... a keys file with the hotkeys, a menu file with the menu entries, a style file with the definitions of the styles. it just works for me..

It has pretty reasonable defaults (if you remove all config files completely) for the most part, despite the horrible that the University of Illinois EWS lab folk unleash on their users, and is exceptionally configurable. You can make it do just about anything you want in terms of window management, so it's great for trying new ideas that you think will make you more productive... then when you realize you're wrong it's easy to go back.

Now... there are lots of weird and overly complicated FVWM configs out there. Some distros give a default config where everything is FFM except for like xterm and xcalc, which are click-to-focus. Blech. And that's maybe it's biggest problem: it's very easy to come up with horribly inelegant and hackish configurations. But the window managers I find to be more elegant (twm, WindowMaker, Plan 9's thingythingwhatever it's called) all have limitations or issues that annoyed me enough to make me get rid of 'em.

One of these days my desk is going to collapse in the middle and all its weight will come down on my knee and tear my new fake ACL. It could be tomorrow. This is my concern.

The only desktop shell/environment I've been able to use for a while is Blackbox Lean. I've yet to find anything for Linux that is as nice looking and as functional and as fast. Fluxbox/blackbox for Linux isn't nearly as nice as it is for Windows, ironically enough, and Gnome and KDE are too slow and bloated.

GUI? We don't need no steeenking GUI. We've got vim, bash, gcc, and gdb. What more could you want? GNU Emacs?

Okay, GUIs are kinda nice for viewing porn on the Internet, and are required if you want to run a graphical web browser. But outside of that, why bother?

Yes, this was lifted from my response in the IDEs thread. It's only partially representative of my thoughts on yaoi: I do prefer GNOME when actually using a desktop environment. Just...get rid of Metacity, plzkthx.

While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,And my heart was filled with mournng, mourning for my dear amour."'Tis not possible!" I uttered, "Give me back my free hardcore!"Quoth the server: 404.